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ve and some insights to the Chinese translation of English movie titles.
　
Chapter 2 Basic Knowledge of Movie Titles
　How to create excellent Chinese translation? It is always the key point in our daily English learning. The translation of movie titles appears to be a simple and easy task due to the short content in it. However, it’s very rather complicated and difficult to catch the exact translation. What’s more, supposed you are about to translate a film title, but if you even don’t know what is movie title, can you give a Chinese version for the film? Scholars should bear a movie title as a trademark of a certain movie in their minds. So it’s necessary for scholars to be familiar with the sources, types and functions of English movie titles firstly. The following is a brief instruction to the sources, characteristics and main functions of movie titles.
2.1 Sources of Film Titles
　In order to have a further understanding of the sources of movie titles, it’s necessary to be clear about how to name English movie titles, which can definitely facilitate the translation work. According to He Ying, most film titles can pre-tell the plot, background, theme, main characters.
　There are a large part of English movies named after the main heroes or heroines, for instance, “ Spider Man ”（蜘蛛侠） and “Forest Gump ”（阿甘正传） and so on. And some others named with some adjective added to describe their heroes or heroines, such as “ Pretty Woman” （风月俏佳人） and “ My Fair Lady ”（窈窕淑女）.
　Another favored naming method of English movie titles is the hint of the general plot of the film. The plot may lead the story from the very beginning to the end, which can be demonstrated by the following examples:“ Around the World in 80 Days”（环游世界80天）, “ The Death of the Nile ”（尼罗河上的惨案）and “火烧圆明园 ”（”The Burning of Imperial Palace”）, “秋菊打官司”（“The Story of Qiu Ju ”）. And the plot refers to the time, place and environment of the plot. Those titles imply the information of the events depicted in the movie in order to arouse the audience’s memory and imagination of that important place or historical time. Here are some examples: “Waterloo Bridge” （魂断蓝桥）, “The Day After Tomorrow”（后天）, “ 红高粱”（“Red Sorghum”）and“林海雪原”（“TRACKS IN THE SNOWY FOREST”）.
　Sometimes we even can get the authors’ main feelings of writing from their titles, namely, some films are named after the theme or the object in order to provide the audience the main theme in the film. Interested in the implied topics of film titles at the first sight, the audience will be eager to watch them from the beginning to the end. A host of film titles can be listed to illustrate the above situation such as “Brave Heart”（勇敢的心）, “A Beautiful Mind ” （美丽心灵）, “人到中年”（“At Middle Age”） and “心急吃不了热豆腐”（“Eat Hot Tofu Slowly”）. In some cases, a restrictive word, such as adjective and a possessive word may be added to front of the object to make the title more attractive and unique. Here are some example: “Love Letter” (情书), “Gingko Red ”(隔世情缘), “Hot Blood”(热血)and so on. Thus, to name after an object is also a frequently-used method.